Ireland's clueless government broadband "strategy"

Impetus

Today's Irish Times has a story headlined:

Eir launches legal challenge against rural phone services duty. It is pathetic in the extreme that this policy decision has been allowed by the State to have to go to the court system.

Eir should be allowed to remove copper in areas where it has installed GB internet over fiber, providing it provides boxes in each copper using household/business to support the equivalent copper service over fiber, at no extra cost to the householder.

It is folly for any city or country to expect a telco install and maintain separate networks based on two technologies and duplicate their costs of doing business.

The new GB (Gigabit or 1 000 million bps) fiber should be open to unbundling use by competitors, in the same was as copper was. It is easier to achieve unbundling over fiber because all a competitor has to do is mail out their access card to the customer, for them to do a self-service card replacement in the slot of the media box. Or they can ask their new service provider to get somebody to do it, at a charge of say EUR 500 to cover the truck roll costs.

The State's ESB’s pylons should be open to Eir to use as a means of connecting the new fiber network to rural households – because they run over fields, rather than slavishly following the Eir pylon system which uses the road network. Many/most of Eir's rural pylons are in a poor state of repair, and lie at various angles, threatening the reliability of the platform.

Andorra has allowed Telecom Andorra to remove copper because the system is 100% fiber. This carries phone, internet, television, multi-media and radio.

The fact that Eir has to launch a legal challenge shows the cluelessness of the decision making process in bureaucratic Ireland, (and the EU), because the status quo is a wasteful and obsolete means of doing business.

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/eir-launches-legal-challenge-against-rural-phone-services-duty-1.2772301

Bass Reeves

This is the government's third or forth effort at a rural broadband scheme. The last one was given to 3 mobile. To get an idea of how poor Comreg and the government manage the oversight of telecoms infraustrcture you have to look at 4G. At present the after the change over to 4G from 2 and 3G many area's that previously had good mobile service are left now with the inability to make phone call not to mind having mobile broadband.

The landline story has followed that. Comreg got caught up intrying to play hard ball over telephone landline when at present most people only have a landline if they need broadnband, Mind you I know a few people who got them back in as there have no mobile coverage at there home after the installation of 4G service by mobile service providers.

You also had the debacle over the 999 service which was desinated a universial service. Then Comreg decided to tender it gave it to a company who when the started providing the service found they were losing money so the charges to the other telecoms companied nearly doubled from the tendering cost.

The government has designated over 900K homes in the new broadband schemes out of about 2 million houses in the country. It seems a little high. Is this an attempt to create a second telco that can compete with Eir rather than provide universal broadband. It really is a mess.